


Blessed Among Women

by bramblePatch



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Culture, Ancestors, Biblestuck, Brooding Caverns, Gen, Implied Character Death, non-explicit grub death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 06:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/606634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What did the Dolorosa leave behind? What did she stand to gain?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Writings of the Disciple, Annals 1: 26-30

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChloroformFish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChloroformFish/gifts).



_26_ And at that time the Handmaid of Death appeared to a young attendant of the Breeding Caverns, a woman newly of the rank and title of Chaperon, _27_ and she did make to defend herself from the Demoness. _28_ And the Handmaid said unto her, "Do not waste my time. Go forth and you shall find a grub of uncommon color, _29_ and he shall be your charge as you were the charge of your lusus, though he is of no sign or caste. _30_ And your title shall be called Dolorosa," which means, "she who sorrows."


	2. Daughter of the Mother

A grub with flesh the color of fine jade crawls, mewling, from the wreckage of a meteor strike.

She is a wonder, surviving unscathed the natural disaster that has slain most of her broodmates. The auxiliatrices who clear the rubble away did not expect to find any survivors. This is not particularly of any concern; pre-pupal grubs are not exactly sapient, and of the several dozen larvae destroyed in the meteor strike, it is doubtful that more than a handful would have survived to adulthood anyway. The little jade is not by any stretch of the imagination unwelcome, though; jade grubs are rare, and if she persists in her unlikely habit of not dying, she will one day serve with them as attendant to the Mother Grub and overseer of the caverns.

Her lusus-bond, too, is cause for comment: a juvenile Mother Grub, one who so far had shown every indication of failing to thrive, as most second- and third-generation Mother Grubs fail. But now the huge pale creature is stirring, showing none of the lethargy that previously had been her default state.

The Prioress of the caverns is pleased. Meteor strikes are sometimes said to be omens of the hatching of a great troll; the custodial imprinting of a Virgin Mother Grub is thought a very good piece of luck as well. She does not think of herself as a superstitious woman, but it is easy to take comfort from these things all the same.

 

Porrim Maryam is four sweeps old. She grows tall and strong and straight-limbed, her smooth slate-colored shoulders and face freckled with jade from long hours under the sunlight.

Tucked away in a sturdy hive in a desert oasis, bathed in the sun and guarded by the Virgin Mother Grub that marks her as a child of the Line of Virgo, she has had little occasion to learn fear of her own kind. Indeed, she rarely sees others of her kind. The desert does not easily support many trolls and so most of the others she sees are transients - imperial agents in armored conveyances with fat tires to navigate the sands, checking to see whether the rare jade-blood wiggler has been eaten by anything, or caravans of green-eyed merchants and their yellow-blooded guards crackling with shows of psionic energy.

She is more frightened by the creatures of the desert. She could wish that her oasis home were more defensible, when some nights she must retreat to her hive to keep watch from the window of an upstairs block, armed with compact and atomizer against the musclebeasts that roam the sands. The perils of the day, dead, feral creatures that once were trolls, are both easier and harder to ward off; they are smaller than the musclebeasts and have psychological weaknesses she can exploit, but they are clever and fast. 

Once, a rainbow drinker catches her unawares; she manages to fight it off and escapes to her hive and the protection of her lusus, but she's woozy and anemic for nights afterward. Her bitten throat heals cleanly, with no trace of scarring. After a few perigees, she puts the attack out of her mind entirely, except in that she's a little more on her guard when she leaves her little lush patch and walks into the desert.

 

Porrim is very nearly seven sweeps old and her lusus is dying.

She doesn't panic; she's almost numb. She's been half-expecting this for more than a sweep now. In a way, she's grown used to a hard kernel of dread in the pit of her stomach and there's a freedom in the cold sick feeling left behind when it dissolves. 

The Virgin Mother Grub lies in the long, carefully tended grass that surrounds the hive, a strain of vegetation that even with the aid of the sluggish spring of the oasis to feed her lawnring, Porrim has had to work hard to make flourish in the desert. The big grub is too weak now to fly or to burrow and her breath comes with an odd whistling sound.

Porrim wonders, as the sun crawls past the eastern horizon and sets the sky glaring, if she ought to deliver a mercy strike. It's clear that her Mother won't be recovering from this bout; it's been fairly evident for several nights now, although she hadn't wanted to admit it. She can't bring herself to cull her lusus, though, so she just curls up next to the big white form, her new eyeliner-cum-scimitar balanced across her lap, and she waits.

From time to time she blinks, hard, to clear her eyes of the tears that stain her vision seafoam green, but when finally the Mother Grub shudders and is still and the time has come for Porrim to harvest the matriorb, her hand is firm and steady.

 

Ingenue Mornsong is twelve sweeps old and is proud to think herself an adult.

Living among other trolls has been an adjustment this past sweep and a half; she still has a bit of a reputation for oddness among the other young women in the caverns. Many of them can stand the sun as well, but she still finds that few seem to enjoy it as she does - or rather to miss it; she hasn't seen daylight in several perigees. Her freckles fade, and gradually her eyesight adjusts to the constant darkness until it seems odd to think that at first her eyes had been so weak in the dim corridors that bore through the bedrock to connect the ancient broodhives of the breeding caverns.

And if she's a little strange in her companions' estimation, she's perhaps a little exotic as well; Mornsong never seems to want for companionship.

 

Ingenue Mornsong is eighteen sweeps old when a squad of Imperial enforcers descends on the Breeding Caverns.

The great social hall, usually a moderately busy hub of off-duty activity, is more crowded than Mornsong has ever seen it - it is one of the few spaces built to accommodate the entire adult population of the caverns, but rarely sees full capacity, and almost never with the low undercurrent of near panic that currently fills the assembled - enough to set anyone who wasn't already worried on edge.

Off to the other end of the hall, one of the elders of the Caverns speaks in low tones to the Imperials - a tall tealblood in a legislacerator's uniform, accompanied by a few others of varying middle hue wearing the uniform of some force that Mornsong cannot place and several war drones, biotechnological constructs bred for imperial service, bigger and clumsier but no less deadly than the filial drones employed by the Breeding Caverns. From where she stands, Mornsong can't hear the conversation; she isn't sure she wants to. 

There was a time, long before Mornsong was hatched, that the jadeblooded had nothing to fear from any other quarter - when it was not an affectation when other trolls spoke of the will of the Mother, and those who attended the Mother were priestesses and queens in their own right. Now, while the Empress has not, by simple biological reality, been able to remove the Auxiliatrices entirely from power, they have not been left unmolested, either. The Caverns are self-governing in night-to-night matters, but they still answer to the Empire.

A wave of attentiveness sweeps through the crowd, and they're turning their attention to the legislacerator as he unceremoniously dumps the contents of a sack he's carrying onto the floor. The carcass of a dead grub falls wetly to the paving stones, accompanied by what appears to be most of a small reptilian lusus. Both leak blood too green to be yellow, too yellow to be green.

Lime. A forbidden shade. They don't often crop up, anymore, but when they do they're not to be allowed to survive long enough to imprint on a lusus or pupate.

"Your records indicate we're looking for an Ingenue Wingfall in this matter." The pit nearly drops out of Mornsong's stomach. She knows Wingfall, a girl a couple of sweeps younger than herself; a friend and a sometime flushed dalliance. Glancing around, it's not hard to spot her; the crowd hastily parts around Wingfall, none of the other Auxiliatrices wishing to be seen standing too close to the accused. There's a part of Mornsong that could cut them for that response.

There's a somewhat larger part of her that's pointing out that _she's_ not stepping any closer to the hapless Wingfall, herself.

The legislacerator stalks forward, bright teal eyes tracking over faces and garments, and correctly singling out his target. "Ingenue?" His voice isn't overtly cruel, but brisk and businesslike. Mornsong thinks she might almost have preferred him smug and gloating. "I need you to come with me to get this sorted out. I'd prefer not to involve my escort - that might result in... casualties."

To her credit, Wingfall holds her head high as she's led away; she's allowed that dignity at least. 

No one in the breeding caverns ever sees her again. But then, Mornsong is fairly sure none of them expected to.


	3. Mother of Rebellion

Chaperon Mornsong is twenty sweeps old and has barely adjusted to being called by her new title, when a meteor strike again tears through an outer section of the trial caverns like a knife through congealed grubsauce.

The collision can be heard - felt, almost - throughout much of the breeding caverns. It is hardly the first such event; indeed, it's happened a few times in living memory of those in the caverns, and "living memory" does not mean as much among the jadeblooded as it does among some colors. It reverberates through Mornsong's quarters, the tiny private suite she'd moved into not a perigee previous with her promotion. She's woken from a sound sleep, groping for the portal in the side of the recuperacoon before she's really come to her senses.

The physical shock that woke her is utterly dwarfed by the realization that she is not alone in her respiteblock.

The other troll is a woman in a dress embellished with garish green; thin, tall, with dramatically spiraling horns and the blunt features usually associated with lowbloods. Her eyes give no hint as to whether this assumption is correct, the color shifting uncannily through bright unnatural shades.

Mornsong has a lipstick to hand before the sopor has slid from her skin, the tube shifting under her grip into its chainsaw form. 

The stranger sighs. She is armed, but the slender spikes she carries hang loosely in her fingers. "Get your ass out of the 'cupe, you have work to do," she growls between clenched teeth.

"Who are you?" Mornsong demands. Her weapon remains in her hand, prioritized over strigil or clothing. "What are you doing here?"

The woman gives her an utterly disgusted look, and, casting a look around the little room, grabs a robe that hangs over the edge of the desk and tosses it in Mornsong's direction. "We really don't have time for this, Dolorosa," she snaps, then, after what seems to be a moment's consideration, eyes flashing a bit more quickly, "well, _you_ don't."

Mornsong catches the garment, although she doesn't put it on, choosing to drape it over one shoulder as she continues to watch the intruder. "Who are you?" she asks again, although she's starting to build her own suspicions.

"A messenger. It doesn't matter," says the eldritch woman. "Fuck, you're a stupid, suspicious little bitch at this age, aren't you? Look, I don't care if you trust me, just get going. Someone else finds him first and we're all screwed sideways."

Maybe she somehow received a dud batch of sopor, Mornsong considers. This isn't the sort of dayhorror she'd expect from sleeping dry, but she can't think of another reason why what appears to be the Handmaid of Death should be in her respiteblock.

The Demoness - if indeed it is she, and if indeed she's actually here - shifts her grip on the needles in her hands. "I am _not_ kidding around, Dolorosa Mornsong," she growls.

"That's not my title," the Chaperon says, grasping at the one bit of this surreal experience that she can definitively say is _wrong_ rather than nonsensical.

"It will be," retorts the woman. She draws herself up to her full height, a little less than Mornsong's own, and the shifting garish light that fills her eyes begins to limn her skin. "The trial caverns. Now."

Before Mornsong can ask any more, the Demoness spins the flickering wands with a flick of her wrists, and seems to dissolve in a sizzling shimmer of colorful light.

 

Chaperon Mornsong feels as if she ages sweeps in the next twenty minutes.

She's still not sure why, after her visitor's departure, she followed the Demoness's instructions and made her way down to the devastated trial caverns. She was, indeed, the first to arrive there, a quiet purposeful shadow making her way through chaotic corridors. She was not stopped, for all that the rubble still smokes and settles; the mantle marking her recent promotion has ensured her unchallenged access to the scene, along with an air of confidence which Mornsong is really not certain how she maintained.

The heat, and the scent of hot stone and scorched grubflesh, is already wicking away into the cool night - fresh air, flooding in through the gash in the cavern roof, a draft of pure surface wind. That alone is almost enough to set Mornsong reeling. How long has it been since she breathed surface air? Ten sweeps or nearly, not since she was a child, simply Porrim, on the sands of the world. Looking up, she can see through that rent in the stone to a swath of deep purple sky, scattered with stars and streaked with the fuchsia and orange of rapidly impending dawn.

(How rapidly? she wonders, trying to work out what the season is, how long until sunlight, _real sunlight_ , might creep across into the bit of sky she sees there.)

A high whimpering cry echoes across the debris, and Mornsong picks her way across still too-warm stone in search of the miraculously surviving grub that makes the noise. 

When she finds him... This must be a mistake, for this of all grubs to be the one someone wanted her to be sure to find. She can't imagine how he survived long enough to find himself in this unlikely scene - he's small, seems almost underdeveloped, with his tiny nubs of horns and fangs like a row of seed pearls. And his color - the scarlet of decay and danger. No troll should be that bright a red.

Mornsong should cull the larva where he lies. His existence is not only forbidden, it is impossible; no lusus will choose him, guard him to adulthood. He cannot survive. It would be a kindness to destroy him now.

And yet, after a long moment's consideration, she carefully stoops and picks up the little mutant. She nestles him in the crook of one arm; when she lifts her other hand to brush dust from his face, he wraps stubby grublegs around her wrist and tries ineffectually to gnaw on her finger. 

She's handled grubs before, so many times. She's enjoyed the work, taken satisfaction in her job and her role in the continuation of the species and the empire. Never before has Mornsong encountered a grub that makes her feel as if her bloodpusher is trying to back flip through her windcanal.

She knows the reasoning behind the culling of mutants - they're sickly, they're unpredictable, they don't thrive. A mutant grub is weak, and the lusimorphs can sense this, will never bond with one. This is the accepted wisdom.

The accepted wisdom _cannot_ account for a tough little mutant who has survived that which killed all of his broodmates.

And see, when she wraps him in her cape, the sheer green fabric mutes and muddies his color until he might be a maroon or a brown.

Mornsong is halfway back to her quarters, the grub swaddled and carried close, before she quite realizes that she means to flee with him. Once she realizes it, it seems almost the most natural thing in the world. He needs her, and she certainly can't stay here with him.

And she'd be lying if she said that tiny taste of fresh air had been enough.

 

The renegade Chaperon Mornsong barely sleeps in the next three or four perigees.

She tells herself, firmly, again and again - she does not regret her choice.

At first, she mostly tells herself this out of stubbornness - going back now would be a death sentence to both herself and the grub, who she has dubbed Kankri for no reason other than that he seems to like it and that she's full aware that if she calls him something other than "grub," it's that much harder to walk away. At this point, even if she did leave him behind, she's fairly certain that she would not be allowed to return to the caverns unchallenged.

And so, she thrusts herself into the role of caregiver, because to do otherwise would be to admit that she's thrown her life away on nothing more than a whim and the word of a woman who she is now not entirely sure even exists. Eventually she realizes, with a sudden start, that she's not just rationalizing anymore. 

Kankri grows; after a few perigees his aggressiveness ebbs and he becomes fat and sluggish. Mornsong nearly worries herself sick over this new development. Then he secretes himself in a dark corner of their current dwelling and begins to build a cocoon, and she nearly laughs herself sick. Imagine - not having seen impending pupation in a healthy grub. She can hardly call herself "Chaperon" if she's going to miss things like that, can she?

Can she.

Why ever has she thought she _could_ , these last few perigees?

She pushes that thought back, refusing to acknowledge it, until the grub is safely passed into his pupal stage and she has nothing to do but make sure the pupa is safe and fend for herself. Then - oh, then. Then the doubts come back hard, harder almost than those first few weeks when she'd slept rough and traveled as if hunted.

What right has she to use a title earned within the breeding caverns, when she lives like this? What _reason_? She's not a Chaperon - she attends no Mother Grub, supervises no younger jades. She has a grand total of one youngster in her care, and he is passing beyond the point where any troll of the caverns would trouble herself with him. No, that title is no longer hers to claim, and hasn't really been since she absconded from the responsibilities it represents. 

And in leaving behind the title given her in the caverns, she finds to her surprise that she knows what she will call herself instead. Death's Handmaid called her "Dolorosa" - it is a title not often used in this night and age, but Mornsong has seen it in the old texts. It means "she who mourns"; it is the title of a widow, a refugee, a survivor. A troll who outlives her station. Traditionally, a title not granted but claimed.

Mornsong can be a Dolorosa, she thinks.


End file.
